Dmitri Tcherniakov turns Shostakovich's "satirical tragedy" into a riveting piece of theatre, help by an outstanding performance from Patricia Racette and a top class orchestral performance from new ENO Musical Director Mark Wigglesworth.

Where is the line? Where does the stage end and the audience begin? This is what Australian director Barrie Kosky probes in his production pairing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle.

A very welcome and triumphant revival of Peter Grimes begins Opera North’s Festival of Britten season, soon to be followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice. The work has often been described as Britten’s greatest, the paeans of praise beginning soon after its first performance just after the Second World War, often involving the word “enigma”.

Twenty-eight immobile cast members faced the audience from the long white bench which comprised the totality of Katrin Lea Tag’s bare set. Meanwhile, a floor-level, period instrument orchestra delivered the attention-grabbing, minor key Overture to Purcell's 1688 Dido and Aeneas.

At the end of the season, and before closing for the summer break, the Komische Oper Berlin reprise some of their most successful recent productions for one night only in the Komische Oper Festival, including the popular “cartoon” Magic Flute. Included in this busy week was a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, a rarely performed epic opera of battle-torn love and murder.

You can’t accuse Vladimir Jurowski of lacking ambition. This LPO concert of his, featuring artfully sequenced works by Beethoven, Schoenberg and Nono, was dedicated “to all the people in the world who are still suffering injustice”.

In a promotional video for Opera North's new production of From The House of the Dead, director John Fulljames gives us two seemingly opposing views on Leoš Janáček's final opera- that it is “the most intense opera of the twentieth century,” but also a piece in which “very little happens.